Ben

Repetition is something that gets to me. Everybody experiences it when they are reading news, searching and during general browsing.

There is a ridiculous amount of repetition on the Internet, I’m not talking about the generally similar articles, posts, pictures etc out there as they still add extra information, but whole articles can be spread over dozens of websites with no extra information, it’s a bit of a waste and it’s not necessary, I can understand for archival purposes that having multiple copies of information can keep information available for a long time, but there are many services available that do this professionally, for free and sometimes without request, these services are necessary so that the internet doesn’t lose important information.

Recently through the millions of Blogs set up around the world people have gotten into a habit of copying and pasting an article, a picture, a whole section of a website with nothing more than “website x had this to say” or “our friends at x wrote this”. Spreading information is important these days as it’s easy to get your “incredibly important” news/article buried under the “general crap” that other websites spew out, however copying an article from a very prominent site and pasting it onto your 2-bit blog has little possibility of reaching a further audience.

I try my best when sharing information from an important article or blog post to add to the information supplied, even writing a whole article about my views/experiences and linking to theirs. I’m not going to say that people only do this to get their search rankings up, because there are sites that genuinely want to spread the information, however it just seems lazy to me to not write at least a paragraph about the article, isn’t that what their site is there for in the first place? Spreading it’s own information?